I started writing this piece at lunchtime, well, speaking it, that is. Recently getting a trial subscription with Whispr Flow which can mostly understand my Brummie accent better than Samsung or Google (I have tested!). Has meant that my MSN based typing speed now pales in comparison to the wonder of me talking at length instead.
At the start of the year I think I might have fallen into the new years trap. It’s time to finally master all those things I said I was going to learn and this time i’m not going to make any excuses. Shockingly, every year that has happened, life has found a way to make excuses possible. The perfect example for this was setting up a website. I knew all the component parts required:
- Purchase a Domain
- Work out how i’m going to host it
- Learn HTML to make a website
- Make sure it’s securely setup
- Create domain emails
- Decide how much i’m willingly to spend monthly keeping it alive
The biggest one missing from the list was putting myself out on the internet. When you make a mistake in the real world, the blast radius is relatively small and i’ve not had many large public speaking engagements as of late so been safe in that respect. However, if you get something wrong on the internet, it’s there forever, and with the Wayback Machine, even longer! It scared me into excuses and was also another reason I would stop when thinking about using Github. The whole point of Github is a record of history that is saved and their repos for free accounts was only ever public until recently. I am all for building in public but the fear of having a constant record of a mistake was not worth it.
Despite all that, this year was going to be the year and AI helped me to finally build the site. I’ve always wanted to start writing, even if it is into the ether, so at least I’m actually doing something. When I first started I’d decided I must have two pieces out every week, one available on Tuesday and one on Thursday, mostly because I figured that kind of consistency was the only way to build any real momentum, and so I was leaning on AI quite a bit. When you’re working to a content calendar you’re not really thinking about what’s actually worthwhile writing about, you’re writing for the sake of having something up. You kind of need that at the start, so there’s something for people to look at and not a dreaded empty website.
Now I’ve had it going for nearly a year I can take my time a bit more, and in the last few weeks I’ve started to think about what I actually want to write about. From my conversations I’m starting to see a lot of people on the same curve. You start using AI, suddenly you feel super productive and you’re throwing out everything asked of you, plus more. But the reality is you’re throwing out a lot of content and you don’t know how much of it is actually what you want.
There’s a term going round for the feeling at the top of that curve, a “meat proxy”, coined by the developer Niklas Gruhn in August, which is basically being a vessel for whatever the AI came out with. I don’t think I got what that meant until I actually was one. You prompt, AI spits out a paragraph and it sounds good enough so you just… send it. When your output gets to generally ok and the volume is so vast, you start getting to the point of not being able to see the difference anymore. That’s the vessel bit, you’re not really writing, you’re just hitting the slot machine. If I’m just sending AI text out, is the person on the other end even going to read it properly? Because if I’m honest, if I was the one receiving it, I probably wouldn’t. So then what’s the point? What am I actually putting out into the world if I wouldn’t stop and read it myself? A few weeks back I felt like I’d properly become the “meat proxy”, not just dabbling in it but actually living in it, and it really snapped something in me.
I am very much about tech helping me, as I lean on tech to get my view across. Back in primary school (under 11 years old for international readers) moving from a pencil to the handwriting pen was a huge deal. In hindsight we were on pencils so we could make mistakes with our writing but once on the pens it was hand smudges and finality. Probably not something I grasped at that age and maybe I should have stayed on pencils longer. Thankfully I recognised my handwriting was terrible and when I had the option to type instead I jumped headfirst.
There’s a clarity in that, the words are just there on the screen and you don’t have to worry about how it looks or whether it’s smudged. Spellcheck mattered even more for me, because I’ll spell something out phonetically and not be 100% sure where one letter goes.
However, as much as I’ve tried and tried to automate getting my voice out, AI is not really getting it and I don’t think it’s possible. There are all these people who say you can build skills to make it sound like you, and maybe you get some kind of approximation, but you can’t tell AI to look at a few texts and hope it represents you. As I’ve started using more voice products for input, first Yaps about three months ago and now Whispr Flow, I’ve found that’s going to be the best option for me, because it’s me speaking and it’s the most natural for getting across what I want to say. The problem is you can’t really speak in all settings and whispering this article in the office, on a train or in the wind is not really viable. I can say that from first hand experience trying to use voice on a train with some loud children near by to me and to a lesser extent trying to do that in a busy office.
I’m still trying to work out what is my voice on here. You have one voice for your friends, another for work and however many other areas of life, which takes a different slice of you. But when you’re just writing, what actually is that voice and what is it I’m trying to get across? I think it’s going to take me a bit more time to rediscover now I’m taking AI out more and bringing this human back in the loop. I will still have to use AI to do a pass for grammar, because I don’t know where commas go, and I’ve been told by many people who are a lot more qualified that I definitely don’t.
Note I think the commas are in the right places with AI checking